Breaker switch started flipping on my last brew

[Vale71]

What ever it was in my case, once I cleaned the element surface (which was no easy feat) the issue went away...It was not the main gfci breakers but rather one of the individual din breakers in my control panel. It was a brand new triclamp based 6000w element from brewmation and I was pretty upset with myself at the time. I had the max power output set to 70% effectively bringing the watt density down loawer than the ULWD rating it had but still the geletinization of the rye from stepping from 120 degrees up was just too thick regarless. Havent had and issue yet since but I no longer step mash the rye that way.

The ony explanation I could think of is that the scorching dampened heat transfer so much that the element overheated and this somehow caused a temporay short to ground overloading the circuit and causing the breaker to trip. Maybe the insulation that keeps the actual resistive element from touching the outside stainless sleeve looses its insulating properties beyond a certain temperature causing a short to ground and the load breaker tripped before the GFCI could trip?
Otherwise as others have said overheating would only cause resistance to increase and current to drop, which is true of any simple conducting material. To reverse this relationship you need solid state components such as is the case with NTC probes.

 

[Bobby_M]

You're probably onto something there. The resistive core in an element is kept away from the grounded outside sheath with a hard pack of ceramic powder. Then the sheath is heated up red hot and bent into whatever shape it's going to be. The QC process involves testing the core's resistance to ground cold, and after a few heat cycles. As long as it's not shorting, it passes. There is no telling how small of a gap there is between the two conductors at any given spot along the run but it could be paper thin. One odd heat cycle can conceivably get them to touch. That's why I'm a little freaked out when folks intentionally dry fire the elements to clean them